Donna Tartt’s exquisite novel The Goldfinch has 771 pages. Eleanor Catton won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for her 834 page masterpiece The Luminaries. And now City on Fire, the 900-page debut novel by New York writer Garth Risk Hallberg, has been acquired for nearly $2 million.

In a two-day bidding war that took the industry by storm last week, 10 publishers bid more than $1 million for the work already being compared to Michael Chabon and Thomas Pynchon.

According to Hallberg’s agent Chris Parris-Lamb, “[the events] revolve around a central mystery: what exactly is going on behind the locked steel doors of a derelict townhouse in the East Village, and what might it have to do with the shooting in Central Park in the novel’s opening act?”

“The scale of it, the vision of it, the big political ideas, how tightly knitted all the stories are to each other and how densely and pleasurably plotted it is, made me feel like, for the purposes of a movie, he had done the lion’s share of the work that anyone would have to do,” Rudin said. “It doesn’t need to be massively reinvented to be a movie.”